Tag Archives: Teaching

I wrote this as a long email to a list this week and, based on the feedback I’ve received, I thought it would be worthwhile posting it here. This is a topic to which I have given a lot of thought over the years, starting as a fellowships tutor at Harvard during my own grad school years and, more recently, as an undergraduate advisor and resident fellow at Stanford. While the specific context that elicited this essay was whether getting a Ph.D. in anthropology is worth the cost given uncertain job prospects, I think that the approach applies more generally.

Choosing to go to grad school is a decision that is fraught with uncertainty and a degree of risk. There are plenty of nightmare stories to go around about great teachers/scholars who get trapped in an exploitative cycle of perpetual adjuncting. However, a Ph.D. can also be a platform from which to launch a productive and rewarding career both within the academy and outside of it. Here are some of the issues that I think any student approaching a Ph.D., especially in anthropology, should consider:

(1) Are you passionate about research and communication of your research? For better or worse, the rewards within the academy accrue to research and publication. Some professional schools have made substantial progress in developing teaching (and clinical) tracks for faculty that reward teaching and other applied work, but this is typically not the case in disciplines housed in colleges of arts & sciences, as anthropology typically is. You need the passion for your research question to get you through the inherent tedium of research and the many obstacles to successful publication. A commitment to research does not mean giving up on teaching or other activities (such as organizational or other applied work). The NSF career awards, for example, require applicants to coherently weave their research interests with their teaching. However, research requires a commitment and, based on my rather unscientific sample, it seems that the people who are most productive in research are the people who are really driven to answer questions and are committed to publishing not because they want the professional rewards, but because they care about communication of their results. You have to be willing to write at night when you’re exhausted after you’ve put kids to bed and your grading is done. You have to write on weekends, etc. A passion for answering questions goes beyond a fascination with ideas, a love of social theory, or a commitment to education. There is a certain obsessive quality to the top researchers — answering questions and communicating your results becomes almost a compulsion. This is what helps you deal with the inevitable (and frequent) obstacles and allows you to succeed.

(2) Are you enrolling in a program that will pay for your Ph.D.? Given all the vagaries of the faculty job market, you do not want to go into debt doing a Ph.D. The financial details of different Ph.D. programs have become more critical than ever. Make sure you are informed! Ph.D. programs should pay their students’ tuition and a livable wage since Ph.D. students perform vital services for research universities. These services include the obvious things like teaching and doing the grunt work of research assistants but includes some less obvious, but perhaps more important, things like providing prestige to their institutions. The Ph.D. graduates of an institution are the people who go on to get prestigious jobs and write important works and garner fancy awards and societal recognition that reflect positively on their mother institution. It is difficult to over-state the importance of prestige for the functioning of the top research universities and Ph.D. students play a fundamental role in constructing this prestige. Many programs will pay for a Ph.D., but they are very competitive, as you can imagine. Big grad factories that provide little in the way of resources to their students — either financial or human capital investments — do no one any favors.

(3) If you choose to matriculate in a Ph.D. program, take advantage of the opportunity to gain some concrete (and portable!) research skills. Anthropologists have developed some really amazing methodologies that can be applied broadly. I think that anthropologists sometimes have an inferiority complex about our methods. It never ceases to amaze me how often I hear our students say that anthropologists don’t have methods! To get a sense of the potentially far-reaching impact of methodological innovation in anthropology, check out the many students of Kim Romney and Russ Bernard as just two examples. Ethnography is a very trendy idea in industry now. Having a slightly more tangible skill in addition (e.g., survey design, statistics, GIS, the use of qualitative analysis software like Atlas.ti or NVivo, social network analysis) improves not only your academic job prospects but your ability to secure a job in an NGO or industry.

(4) Communicate with people outside of your small disciplinary circle. The ability to communicate across disciplines increases the number of job opportunities both within the academy and without. With an anthropology Ph.D., you may expect a job in an anthropology department. However, if you are able to communicate with a wider audience and, crucially, convince people why your research is important, you might be able to land a job in a department of environmental studies or ethnic studies or women’s studies or urban studies or community health or … you get the idea. The academy of the future is far more interdisciplinary and interdisciplinarity places a premium on the ability to communicate across traditional disciplinary lines. Talk to people outside your department, write journalistic pieces for local media outlets, or even write a blog. I’m continually surprised how many people with whom I make professional connections who know me from the blog I write in about four times a year!

(5) Are you mobile and flexible? Many people who get sucked into the vicious cycle of perpetual adjunct teaching get that way because they are tied to a specific geographic location because of partner, family, or other obligations. There are good graduate programs all over the country and there are actually jobs but many would require you to move to some place you might not have considered. This includes overseas. Sometimes you take a job that may not be your ideal if it provides you an opportunity to get the work done that then allows you to trade up. If you are constrained to remain in a very specific geographic location, I would think twice about matriculating in a Ph.D. program.

I suspect that this is a step in the professional development process where we lose a lot of outstanding potential first-gen faculty. Mobility and flexibility are easier if you are an upper-middle-class grad who has been financially buffered by your parents and, importantly, when your social support derives from a mobile nuclear family. I think there are many ways that modern professionals resemble hunter-gatherers more than their more recent agricultural forebears and the key commonality is mobility and flexibility: emphasis on the nuclear family as the unit of production, bilateral kinship, high logistical and residential mobility, an ethos emphasizing individuality over group identity. Hunter-gatherers follow prey across a landscape while professionals follow job opportunities. People who are tied to a locality, whether for livelihood-based reasons or persistent social ties, will find this type of flexibility more difficult.

Getting a Ph.D. can pay off, both intellectually and professionally but it takes some planning and, frankly, quite a bit of luck if you’re going to make it in the academy. What is less up to luck is the fallback. Have a fallback plan; think strategically. It won’t hurt your chances within the academy and, in fact, will probably help. There are great opportunities for anthropology Ph.D.s with excellent research and communication skills. I have former students who work for major conservation NGOs (e.g., WCS, WWF) and public health organizations, and who have even started green businesses. I have friends who have gone into industry and done very well. Sapient and Olson, for example, are two companies I know that get major input from anthropologists and anthropological methodologies. Anthropological insights and, yes, methodologies are in demand if you are willing to look outside of the usual channels for employment for anthropologists.

It’s easy to get depressed by the academic job market (and many other job markets for that matter). However, with a little bit of planning and flexibility, getting a Ph.D. in anthropology (or any discipline really) can be an excellent ticket to a rewarding career both within and outside of the academy.

In the spirit of critics misunderstanding the life of university researchers that I started in my last post, I felt the need to chime in a bit on a story that has really made the social-media rounds in the last couple days. This kerfuffle stems from a Forbes piece by Susan Adams enumerating the 10 least stressful jobs for 2013. Reporting on a study from the job-site careercast.com, and to the surprise of nearly every academic I know, she listed university professor as the least stressful of all jobs. Adams writes: “For tenure-track professors, there is some pressure to publish books and articles, but deadlines are few.” This is quite possibly the most nonsensical statement I think I have ever read about the academy and it reveals a profound ignorance about its inner workings. This careercast.com list was also picked up by CNBC and Huffington Post, both of which were completely credulous of the rankings.

Before going on though, I have to give Ms. Adams some props for amending her piece following an avalanche of irate comments from actual professors. She writes:

Since writing the above piece I have received more than 150 comments, many of them outraged, from professors who say their jobs are terribly stressful. While I characterize their lives as full of unrestricted time, few deadlines and frequent, extended breaks, the commenters insist that most professors work upwards of 60 hours a week preparing lectures, correcting papers and doing research for required publications in journals and books. Most everyone says they never take the summer off, barely get a single day’s break for Christmas or New Year’s and work almost every night into the wee hours.

All true.

In the CNBC piece, the careercast.com publisher, Tony Lee, lays down some of the most uninformed nonsense that I’ve ever read:

“If you look at the criteria for stressful jobs, things like working under deadlines, physical demands of the job, environmental conditions hazards, is your life at risk, are you responsible for the life of someone else, they rank like ‘zero’ on pretty much all of them!” Lee said.

Plus, they’re in total control. They teach as many classes as they want and what they want to teach. They tell the students what to do and reign over the classroom. They are the managers of their own stress level.

Careercast.com measured job-related stress using an 11-dimensional scale. These dimensions and the point ranges assigned to each include:

Travel, amount of (0-10)<

Growth Potential (income divided by 100)

Deadlines (0-9)

Working in the public eye (0-5)

Competitiveness (0-15)

Physical demands (stoop, climb, etc.) (0-14)

Environmental conditions (0-13)

Hazards encountered (0-5)

Own life at risk (0-8)

Life of another at risk (0-10)

Meeting the public (0-8)

These seem reasonable enough, but the extent to which they were accurately assessed for at least this first item in the list is another point altogether.

It is important to note that there is enormous heterogeneity contained in the job title “professor.” There are professors of art history and professors of business and professors of law and professors of vascular surgery, and professors of chemistry, and professors of seismic engineering professors of volcanology and … you get the point. No doubt some of these are more or less stressful than others. Many of these involve substantial work in the public eye and meeting the public. Some involve hazardous environmental conditions and physical demands.

However, I will focus mainly on what I see as the most ludicrous statements made by both Lee and Adams: that professors have no deadlines. My life is all about deadlines: article/book submission deadlines, institutional review board deadlines, peer review deadlines, editorial deadlines, and the all-important grant deadlines. There are the deadlines imposed by my students when they apply for grants or fellowships or jobs and need highly detailed letters of recommendation, often on very short notice. Oh, and guess what: grades are due on a particular date at the end of the term. You know, a deadline? And those classes we teach: better have a lecture ready before the class meets. Again, kinda like a deadline. I think that it is worth noting that one is expected to meet these teaching deadlines even when most professional incentives (at least at a research university) are focused around everything in your job description but teaching. There is a trite phrase describing the life of a professor — particularly a junior professor — that seems to have found its way into the general consciousness, “publish or perish.” Notice that it is not “give coherent, interesting lectures and grade fairly and expediently or perish”!

So, yes, there are deadlines and there are very difficult trade-offs relating to the finiteness of time. Honestly, it’s hard for me to imagine how even a casual observer of the university could not see the ubiquity of deadlines for the professor’s life.

In an excellent rebuttal of this list, blogger Audra Diers writes about both the time demands and the economic realities of obtaining a tenure-track job. I will finish up with a few thoughts on competitiveness and “growth potential.” My experience on a variety of job search committees since coming to Stanford is that there are typically hundreds of highly qualified candidates for any given job search. These are all people who have Ph.D.’s and, frequently, already have jobs at other universities. In the anthropology department at Stanford, the majority of faculty joined Stanford from faculty positions at other universities. It is very difficult to get a job at a university like Stanford directly out of graduate school. Inevitably, you are competing against people who have already been assistant professors (or at least post-docs) at other universities and already have a substantial publication and grant-writing record. The differences in salary, teaching loads, and institutional prestige can be substantial. Browsing the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Almanac of Higher Education can provide some numbers. Many people bust it in lower-prestige universities with the hope of eventually getting an opportunity for a job at a place like Stanford or Berkeley or Harvard. This means publishing important work, often while teaching outrageously high teaching loads at universities with primarily teaching missions and that means long hours, juggling many conflicting demands, and enormous individual drive.

If you are a scientist, you are often competing with other scientists for results. Getting yourself in a position to secure such results means successful grant-writing and attracting top students and post-docs to your lab. Now, this competition is often enjoyable and almost certainly drives innovation, but it can be stressful (and deadline filled!). There is nothing quite like the feeling of looking at some journal’s table of contents that’s shown up in your inbox and realizing you’ve been scooped on a problem you’ve spent years working on. There is always that little bit of fear in the back of your head pushing you to publish your results before someone else does.

Where Lee gets the idea that professors “teach as many classes as they want and what they want to teach” is a mystery to me. Universities (and colleges within universities) have rules for the number of courses their faculty are expected to teach. Sometimes, a professor can buy out of some teaching by securing more research funding that specifically budgets for such buy-outs. Within departments, there is the dreaded curriculum committee. My department’s CC decided this year that I should teach all my courses in the Spring quarter. While it’s been nice to have large chunks of research time this Fall, Spring is going to be horrible. This is hardly teaching as much or what I want to teach. Departments have instructional needs (i.e., “service courses”) and someone needs to teach these. Junior faculty are often dumped upon to teach the service courses (e.g., history of the field, methodological courses) that very few students want to attend.

Writes Adams at Forbes, “The other thing most of the least stressful jobs have in common: At the end of the day, people in these professions can leave their work behind, and their hours tend to be the traditional nine to five.” This is just crazy talk. I work every night, some nights are more effective than others, for sure, but, like many professions, I take this as a given for my job.

So being a university professor is hardly a stress-free life. This doesn’t in any way mean that we don’t like our jobs. Being a tenured professor at a major research university is good work if you can get it. The job carries with it a great deal of autonomy, flexibility, and the ability to pursue one’s passion. As a professor, one interacts with interesting, curious people on a daily basis and helps shape future leaders. The job-related stress felt by a university professor is almost certainly not on par with, say, an infantry soldier or police officer, but the job is not stress-free. It never ceases to surprise me of how ignorant about the workings of universities critics often are. This is an instance where there is no obvious political agenda — the study just got some facts badly wrong — but studies like this contribute to disturbing anti-intellectualism (and concomitant disdain for empirical evidence) that has become a part of American public consciousness.

Well, it certainly has been a while since I’ve written anything here. Life has gotten busy with new projects, new responsibilities, etc. Yesterday, I participated in a workshop on campus sponsored by the Woods Institute for the Environment, the Young Environmental Scholars Conference. I was asked to stand-in for a faculty member who had to cancel at the last minute. I threw together some rather hastily-written notes and figured I’d share them here (especially since I spoke quite a bit of the importance for public communication!).

The theme of the conference was “Environmental Policy, Behavior, and Norms” and we were asked to answer three questions: (1) What does doing normative research mean to you? (2) How do your own norms and values influence your research? (3) What room and role do you see for normative research in your field? So, in order, here are my answers.

What does doing normative research mean to you?

I actually don’t particularly like the term “normative research” because it sounds a little too much like imposing one’s values on other people. I am skeptical of the imposition of norms that have more to do with (often unrecognized) ideology and less about empirical truth – an idea that was later reinforced by a terrific concluding talk by Debra Satz. If I can define “normative” to mean with the intent to improve people’s lives, then OK. Otherwise, I prefer to do “positive” research.

For me, normative research is about doing good science. As a biosocial scientist with broad interests, I wear a lot of hats. I have always been interested in questions about the natural world, and (deep) human history in particular. However, I find that the types of questions that really hold my interest these days are more and more engaged in the substantial challenges we face in the world with inequality and sustainability. In keeping with my deep pragmatist sympathies, I increasingly identify with Charles Sanders Pierce‘s idea that given the “great ocean of truth” that can potentially be uncovered by science, there is a moral burden to do things that have social value. (As an aside, I think that there is social value in understanding the natural world, so I don’t mean to imply a crude instrumentalism here.) In effect, there is a lot of cool science to be done; one may as well do something of relevance. I personally have little patience for people who pursue racist or otherwise socially divisive agendas and cloak their work in a veil of free scientific inquiry. This said, I worry when advocacy interferes with intellectual fairness or an unwillingness to accept that one’s position is not actually true.

I think that we are fooling ourselves if we believe that our norms somehow don’t have an effect on our research. Recognizing what these norms that shape your research – whether implicitly or explicitly – helps you manage your bias. Yes, I said manage. I’m not sure we can ever completely eliminate it. I see this as more of a management of a necessary trade-off, drawing an analogy between the practice of science and a classic problem in statistics, between bias and variance. The more biased one is, the less variance there is in the outcome of one’s investigation. The less bias, the greater the likelihood that results will differ from one’s expectations (or wishes). Recognizing how norms shape our research also deals with that murky area of pre-science: where do our ideas for what to study come from?

How do your own norms and values influence your research?

Some of the the norms that shape my own research and teaching include:

transparency: science works best when it is open. This places a premium on sharing data, methods, and communicating results in a manner that maximizes access to information. As a simple example, this norm shapes my belief that we should not train students from poor countries in the use of proprietary software (and other technologies) that they won’t be able to afford when they return to their home countries when there are free or otherwise open-source alternatives.

fairness: this naturally includes a sense of social justice or people playing on an equal playing field, but it also includes fairness to different ideas, alternative hypotheses, the possibility that one is wrong. This type of fairness is essential for one’s credibility as a public intellectual in science (particularly supporting policy), as noted eloquently in this interview with Dick Lewontin.

respect for people’s ultimate rationality: Trying to understand the social, ecological, and economic context of people’s decision-making, even if it violates our own normative – particularly market-based economic – expectations.

flexibility: solving real problems means that we need to be flexible in our approach, willing to go where the solutions lead us, learning new tools and collaborating. Flexibility also means a willingness to give up on a research program that is doing harm.

good-faith communication: I believe that there is no room for obscurantism in the academy of the 21st century. This includes public communication. There are, of course, complexities here with regard to the professional development of young scholars. One of the key trade-offs for young scholars is the need for professional advancement (which comes from academic production) and activism, policy, and public communication. Within the elite universities, the reality is that neither public communication nor activism count much for tenure. However, as Jon Krosnick noted, tenure is a remarkable privilege and, while it may seem impossibly far away for a student just finishing a Ph.D., it’s not really. Once you prove that you have the requisite disciplinary chops, you have plenty of time to to use tenure for what it is designed for (i.e., protecting intellectual freedom) and engaging in critical public debate and communication.

humility: solving problems (in science and society) means caring more about the answer to a problem than one’s own pet theory. Humility is intimately related to respect for others’ rationality. It also means recognizing the inherently collaborative nature of contemporary science: giving credit where it is due, seeking help when one is in over one’s head, etc. John DeGioia, President of Georgetown University, quoted St. Augustine in his letter of support for Georgetown Law Student, Sandra Fluke against the crude attacks by radio personality Rush Limbaugh and I think those words are quite applicable here as well. Augustine implored his interlocutors to “lay aside arrogance” and to “let neither of us assert that he has found the truth; let us seek it as if it were unknown to both.” This is not a bad description of the way that science really should work.

What room and role do you see for normative research in your field?

I believe that there is actually an enormous amount of room for normative research, if by “normative research,” we mean research that has the potential to have a positive effect on people’s lives. If instead we mean imposing values on people, then I am less sure of its role.

Anthropology is often criticized from outside the field, and to a lesser extent, from within it for being overly politicized. You can see this in Nicholas Wade’s critical pieces in the New York Times Science Times section following the American Anthropological Association’s executive committee excising of the word “science” from the field’s long-range planning document. Wade writes,

The decision [to remove the word ‘science’ from the long-range planning document] has reopened a long-simmering tension between researchers in science-based anthropological disciplines — including archaeologists, physical anthropologists and some cultural anthropologists — and members of the profession who study race, ethnicity and gender and see themselves as advocates for native peoples or human rights.

This is a common sentiment. And it is a complete misunderstanding. It suggests that scientists can’t be advocates for native peoples or human rights. It also suggests that one can’t study race, ethnicity, or gender from a scientific perspective. Both these ideas are complete nonsense. For all the leftist rhetoric, I am not impressed with the actual political practice of what I see in contemporary anthropology. There is plenty of posturing about power asymmetries and identity politics but it is always done in such a mind-numbingly opaque language and with no apparent practical tie-in to policies that make people’s lives better. And, of course, there is the outright disdain for “applied” work one sees in elite anthropology departments.

Writing specifically about Foucault, Chomsky captured my take on this whole mode of intellectual production:

The only way to understand [the mode of scholarship] is if you are a graduate student or you are attending a university and have been trained in this particular style of discourse. That’s a way of guaranteeing…that intellectuals will have power, prestige and influence. If something can be said simply, say it simply, so that the carpenter next door can understand you. Anything that is at all well understood about human affairs is pretty simple.

Ultimately, the simple truths about human affairs that I find anyone can relate to are subsistence, health, and the well-being of one’s children. These are the themes at the core of my own research and I hope that the work I do ultimately can effect some good in these areas.

Yesterday, I spent most of the day collecting content for my upcoming classes this spring and getting the course web sites together. For the first time in a while, I will (officially) be teaching two classes in one quarter (which effectively means teaching three or four when I add the other things like lab meetings in). The first is our graduate class on statistics in the anthropological sciences. I taught something like this back in the old department (i.e., Anthropological Sciences) but haven’t taught it in years (though a Google search for “department of anthropological sciences stanford” turns up the syllabus for this class). It is technically a requirement for Ph.D. students in the Ecology and Environment focus within Anthropology, so it’s about time. It will be fun to teach again and we’re looking to use the class as a platform to develop resources for anthropologists doing statistical work (more later).

The other class that I will be teaching starting next week is Ecology, Evolution, and Human Health, a class I first taught last year. This class is meant to be an introduction to the Ecology and Environment undergraduate focus in Anthropology. I’m actually really looking forward to teaching it again. The course material forms the core of a book I am writing on human population biology and my attempts at improving the lectures has done wonders for my writing output of late. We’ll see what happens when the quarter actually starts. Hopefully, between trips to Rwanda and Tanzania and moving into Arroyo House this summer, I will find time to finish it!

Back in December, when the is-anthropology-science kerfuffle was going strong, I wrote a blog post in which I suggested that if you want to feel good about the future of scientific anthropology (which, I admit, can sometimes be difficult, even for an obstinate optimist), all you need to do is look at the great work coming from the new generation of trans-disciplinary anthropologists (and other biosocial scientists). At the time, I put together a short list of people whose work I greatly admire. These included:

Rebecca and Douglas Bird on subsistence and signaling among Martu foragers

In preparing for Anthro 31, I started to put together a list of links to people doing the kind of work we will discuss. In a pique of obsessiveness yesterday, I greatly expanded that list. It occurred to me that this list is somewhat orphaned in an obscure directory for a particular class I occasionally teach and that it would make sense to share it more generally. So, here we go, copied wholesale from my class links page (though that page still contains links to books, professional societies, and other resources for students interested in human ecology, demography, health, etc.):

Upon further reflection, I think that the University of Illinois has to be a major contender for best place to study biological anthropology. Wow, they’ve got an amazing group of biological anthropologists there. Stanley Ambrose, Kate Clancy, Paul Garber, Lyle Konigsberg, Steve Leigh, Ripan Malhi, John Polk, Charles Roseman, Laura Shackelford, Rebecca Stumpf. Too many to link to directly. I don’t know all of them, but the ones I know are outstanding. Yipes! I think they may be plotting to take over the field.

Back to the blog front, you can always count on gems of anthropological, evolutionary, and political wisdom from Greg Laden as well.

Mario Luis Small, at the University of Chicago, has done some really outstanding work measuring how social institutions affect social capital and the impact such differences in social capital actually have for people’s well-being.

A number of excellent human biologists find their home in the Laboratory for Human Biology Research at Northwestern. This includes Bill Leonard, Thom McDade, and Chris Kuzawa. Rumor has it that alumna Elizabeth Sweet is moving back to Northwestern as well. She is doing truly innovative work integrating the rigorous analysis of biomarkers of health (and a bicultural perspective favored by the Northwestern group) and the political economy of economic and social disparities — really getting at how inequality ‘gets under the skin.’ I really look forward to seeing what comes from her future research.

Karen Kramer, in the department formerly known as (Biological) Anthropology at Harvard, is a real leader in integrating evolutionary, demographic, and economic perspectives on human reproduction and the life histories.

Patrick Clarkin at UMass, Boston has a very interesting research program employing biocultural and evolutionary models to understand the effects of war on nutrition and growth among SE Asian diaspora. UMass, Boston is also home to Colleen Nyberg who does great work on acculturation and health, the psychobiology of stress and HPA function, and growth and development.

Let’s not forget our friends across The Pond. Durham may have lost Catherine Panter-Brick to Yale, but they got a number of new folks who, when combined with the veterans, make it a very appealing place to study ecological/evolutionary anthropology. Among the faculty there are my colleagues Gillian Bentley, Rebecca Sear, and Frank Marlowe, and numerous others. Rebecca does very sophisticated work in anthropological demography, while Frank is one of the leading ethnographers of contemporary hunter-gatherers (and my collaborator on our Hadza demography project).

Ruth Mace, in my opinion, does some of the best work in human behavioral ecology right now and she keeps churning out top students at UCL.

I’m looking forward to working with Mhairi Gibson at Bristol on our new project on the transmission dynamics of primate retroviruses and human-wildlife contact in Uganda. She has done excellent work on the behavioral ecology of reproduction and parental investment in Ethiopia.

This is a great line-up and I’m very excited about this (and there are still a couple invitations pending based on complicated field schedules). We will hold the workshop at the IRiSSfacility at 30 Alta Rd., bordering the main campus. This is a lovely spot for a workshop.

Details on applying for the workshop are contained here. We will pay for approved travel expenses of accepted students, post-docs, and junior faculty associated with NICHD-funded population centers.

As a quick teaser of the kind of work that we will discuss, I want to draw people’s attention to two papers by Stanford faculty participating in the workshop that are just out this week. Eric Lambin has a paper (which also happens to be his inaugural paper in PNAS as a member of the NAS) on the interactions between globalization, land use, and future land scarcity. I saw a talk on this last week and it was terrific. Lambin and co-author Patrick Meyfroidt argue that there are four socio-economic mechanisms (displacement, rebound, cascade, and remittance effects) that are amplified by by the process of economic globalization and that can accelerate land conversion. David Lobell has a new paper out today in Nature Climate Change in which he and his co-authors capitalize on a treasure-trove of historical agricultural trials in Africa to measure the impact of warming on maize production. They find that approximately 65% of areas will experience a decline in productivity with a one-degree rise in global temperature if rain patterns are optimal. If rain is sub-optimal, as is likely to be the case, then every site would experience reduced productivity. This supports David’s contention that the effects on agricultural productivity of temperature increase from global climate change can not be understood except in the context of changes in rainfall as well.

Potential students who are interested in studying these issues at Stanford have a number of options. If anthropology is your thing, we have a Ph.D. focus area in Ecology and Environment within the Department of Anthropology. Bill Durham, Lisa Curran, Rebecca Bird, Douglas Bird, and I all teach in this area. Another option, for the more interdisciplinarily inclined, is E-IPER. This is a topic I will have to take up in more detail in a later post since I actually have to do some work organizing our workshop now!

Mobility is a common form of human adaptation to social or environmental risks. Forms of human mobility vary with regard to permanency and spatial scale. For example, foragers or pastoralists may move seasonally in response to resource scarcity and opportunity throughout a more or less stable greater home range. Smallholders and agrarian peasants might be displaced on a more permanent basis as a result of conflict or extreme resource scarcity, migrating internally to cities or other relatively nearby localities perceived to be less risky. International economic migrants may travel long distances on a more or less permanent basis in search of economic opportunity abroad.

Global climate change is predicted to increase migration rates substantially by the middle of the 21st century. This increase in migration is likely to result from multiple, interacting causal mechanisms including an increase in adverse weather events (e.g., droughts, floods), an increase in resource-related conflicts, or declining viability of local environments arising from various forms of land-use/land-cover change. These increases will add to the already substantial movement of human population from rural to urban areas, in response to internal social displacement, and from other economic migration.

Understanding human migration requires the input from scientists from a wide range of disciplines. We are particularly interested in approaches that combine the formalism of demography, on-the-ground social research, and remotely-sensed information of the biophysical environment, the so-called “pixels to people” approach.

In this workshop, we will bring together demographers, anthropologists, economists, and geographers to develop a methodological toolkit for understanding migration as an adaptation to risk. The specific aim of the workshop is to promote knowledge of methods and perspectives from different disciplines, disseminate information about the growing wealth of demographic data on the biophysical environment and human migration, and to foster collaborative and interdisciplinary work. The format will consist of lectures by invited researchers to an audience of other researchers, selected graduate students, and junior faculty. The three-day workshop will have approximately ten faculty and 20 students, whose travel, lodging, and meals will be covered. The format provides substantial time for discussion. The workshop will be held at the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences (IRiSS), Stanford 28-30 April 2011.

Confirmed speakers include:

James Holland Jones, Department of Anthropology and Woods Institute for the Environment, Stanford University (organizer): Formal Models;
Population Projection

William H. Durham, Department of Anthropology and Woods Institute for the Environment, Stanford University: Smallholder Responses to Risk and Uncertainty

Ronald Rindfuss, Carolina Population Center, University of North Carolina and The East-West Center: Population and Environment; Microsimulation

Amber Wutich, School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Arizona State University, Water Insecurity

Lori Hunter, Department of Sociology, University of Colorado: Migration and Health

David Lopez-Carr, Department of Geography, University of California Santa Barbara: Migration and Fertility on the Forest Frontier

A (rather large) printable flier for the workshop can be found here. It includes information on how to apply. Hopefully, we will soon have an all official-like webpage through IRiSS as well, which I will point to when it goes live.

I’ve had this idea for a couple years now and thought that I would put it down on paper as it were. When I first got to Stanford (in fact, when I was being recruited for the job), I was asked if I would teach a class on Human Nature. I remember thinking to myself, “Sweet, this’ll be easy!” You see, I taught for Irv DeVore’s famous class, Science B-29: Human Behavioral Biology more times than I care to recollect. This is a topic for another blog post altogether, but Irv co-taught this class with various luminaries throughout the years including Bob Trivers, Mel Konner, Terry Deacon, and Marc Hauser. When Irv retired, Richard Wrangham took his place, co-teaching with Marc Hauser. Anyway, the key point for the current thread is that if there was one class I was qualified to teach when I came to Stanford, it was a class on Human Nature.

Shortly after I arrived in the summer of 2003, I had a lunch meeting at the faculty club with Bill Durham and Rob Robinson, the director of the program for which I would teach my Human Nature class. I remember being curious about why there would be a program director there. Wasn’t I just teaching the class for Anthropological Sciences? Well, no. It seems that the Human Nature class that everyone wanted would be part of the compulsory freshman program, Introduction to the Humanities (IHUM). “Humanities?!” I exclaimed. “You do realize who you’re talking to here, no?” To say that I was not well prepared to teach a course introducing freshmen at Stanford to the Humanities would be a rather large under-statement. Everyone assured me that everything would be fine. I just needed to find the right co-instructor. I had a very nice meeting with Don Kennedy who was the Stanford President when IHUM was introduced and who was the only scientist to co-teach a class before me (an enviable class on the environment with Richard White). That helped me to conceive of how I might teach such a class and formulate at least a semi-coherent plan for putting the class together.

The details of the class that I ended up teaching for two years should be saved for another post. I found a terrific humanist with whom to share lectures and had a terrific group of IHUM fellows do the hard work of sections, grading papers, etc. When my co-instructor, who was a lecturer at Stanford at the time, moved to a tenure-track position in the History department at San José State University, the class just sort of ended.

Since I stopped teaching that class, I’ve thought from time to time that it would be fun to try the idea again, this time really sticking to the core ideas in the study of Human Nature. One day, I was listening to the Fairport Convention (1969) recording of the seventeenth century English folk song, Matty Groves. While I am no expert folklorist, I am nonetheless struck by the observation that so many of these old folk songs (English and otherwise) are simply riddled with sex, honor, jealousy, loyalty, betrayal, lust, murder, … In short, they are studies in Human Nature. What a great conceit for an IHUM class on Human Nature!

We could go through various folk songs and analyze what they tell us of people’s ideas of Human Nature. What are the commonalities across cultures and through time? How do these ideas relate to current scientific and philosophical work on Human Nature? The thing that would really make this class come together would be performative. These are folk songs, after all, that were meant to be sung. Maybe I could overcome my own performance anxiety and put my under-used guitar to good use and sing a song myself? As I said, a post-tenure project.

I won’t go into too many details here, but I will do a little analysis of Matty Groves, providing some interpretations of the lyrics and pointing to directions that I might take in such a class. The idea is generally to give a flavor of the content of this class. There is a lot of contextual information that is implicit in the song about the social organization of mediaeval/early modern English society. This is definitely something we would want to talk about extensively in class, but I will gloss that for now.

A holiday, a holiday, and the first one of the year.
Lord Donald’s wife came into church, the gospel for to hear.

And when the meeting it was done, she cast her eyes about,
And there she saw little Matty Groves, walking in the crowd.

Remember that holidays used to be holy days. The reason you got out of work, if you were so lucky, was so you could go to church. And what better venue for looking for a little action could there be than church?

Why is Lord Donald’s wife on the make? Chances are that she is much, much younger than her husband. As Mildred Dickemann, and many others, have observed, strongly hierarchical societies are highly hypergynous. Women marry up in social status and marry older men. Chances are, Lord Donald’s wife had no say in her own marriage as it was arranged by her father and emissaries for Lord Donald. For a sense of the degree that status structured this society, it is interesting to note who remains unnamed in the song. Really the main character in the narrative, “Lord Donald’s Wife” as well as “the servant.” My interpretation is that Lord Donald’s wife is bored and not attracted to her brutal, high-status husband who is probably old enough to be her father. The holiday, during which her husband is away, provides her with an opportunity to explore the field. My understanding of human reproductive psychology tells me that young women, despite the mid-century folklore, want to have sex too. Yep, it’s not just boys. There is an interesting Gail Collins’s essay on Twilight in which she writes “This sure sounds like trouble to me: A generation of guys who will settle for nothing less than a porn star meets a generation of women who expect their boyfriend to crawl through their bedroom window at night and just nuzzle gently until they fall asleep.” I agree there is trouble, but I have serious doubts that a whole generation of girls only want to nuzzle and fall asleep.

“Come home with me, little Matty Groves, come home with me tonight.
Come home with me, little Matty Groves, and sleep with me till light.”

“Oh, I can’t come home, I won’t come home and sleep with you tonight,
By the rings on your fingers I can tell you are Lord Donald’s wife.”

Again, note that Lord Donald’s wife has no identity other than that of the Lord’s wife. Her status as such is communicated by conspicuous display of jewelry. Matty is no fool. He knows that there is real danger here…

“What if I am Lord Donald’s wife? Lord Donald’s not at home.
For he is out in the far cornfields, bringing the yearlings home.”

…but the lord’s wife was very persuasive. A rich and powerful lord can afford a beautiful wife (even in a dowry society — the details of this apparent paradox are fodder for lecture, of course). It’s also possible that Matty and Lord Donald’s wife knew each other from childhood.

Note also that wealth came from the land in this agrarian society. Even a rich and powerful lord brings the yearlings home from the far cornfields.

And a servant who was standing by and hearing what was said,
He swore Lord Donald he would know before the sun would set.

And in his hurry to carry the news, he bent his breast and ran,
And when he came to the broad mill stream, he took off his shoes and swam.

A loyal (unnamed) servant may just move up in the hierarchy of servants.

Little Matty Groves, he lay down and took a little sleep.
When he awoke, Lord Donald he was standing at his feet.

Saying “How do you like my feather bed? And how do you like my sheets?
How do you like my lady who lies in your arms asleep?”

Things like beds, sheets, and pillows were luxury goods Matty had probably never experienced as a peasant boy.

Imagine walking into your own bedroom and finding your spouse in bed with a lover. Crimes of passion account for an amazingly large fraction of homicides in a variety of societies. Lord Donald’s anger is probably compounded by the fact that his wife is not only his reproductive partner, but is his property in a very real sense.

“Oh, well I like your feather bed, and well I like your sheets.
But better I like your lady gay who lies in my arms asleep.”

Cheeky boys get spanked.

“Well, get up, get up,” Lord Donald cried, “get up as quick as you can!
It’ll never be said in fair England that I slew a naked man.”

Lord Donald is rightly concerned about his reputation because this is the key to his continued social status. Gossip among peers can destroy the social standing of even the very rich. And, of course, what else do elites have to occupy their time than gossip? Certainly not work or anything else productive.

Rules concerning combat are frequently a central component of honor cultures. Why is that? Concepts like honor, duty, and loyalty and the degree to which they generalize would be major topics for the class.

“Oh, I can’t get up, I won’t get up, I can’t get up for my life.
For you have two long beaten swords and I not a pocket-knife.”

“Well it’s true I have two beaten swords, and they cost me deep in the purse.
But you will have the better of them and I will have the worse.”

“And you will strike the very first blow, and strike it like a man.
I will strike the very next blow, and I’ll kill you if I can.”

Again, a steel sword would have been a serious luxury good. No peasant would have owned such goods nor have had any training in their use. Lord Donald is honorable in the sense that he refuses to slay the naked Matty Groves, but the magnanimity of his offer must be weighed against the serious asymmetry in human capital that is embodied in this duel. Would you know how to use a longsword in a duel? I assume that the weapon in question is some form of longsword since it is “beaten.” Consider also the fact that stature (along with strength) is very much determined by status. One of the most amazing demonstrations of this fact is provided in a plot of the secular trend in men’s stature in the United States published in the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Human Growth and Development (Ulijaszek et al., eds., 1998). Overlain on this plot of the secular trend are the heights of the first 36 presidents (through Nixon) as well as various other period-specific averages. All US presidents but three (Benjamin Harrison, William McKinley, and Harry Truman) were substantially above the median period stature (though James Madison was just above the median). Compare this to a sample of working class in 1830 or British class IV in 1885.

Not a happy situation for Matty. Of course, what are Lord Donald’s options? His social standing would take an express ride to the basement if word got out that his wife was sleeping around — and with a peasant boy no less!

So Matty struck the very first blow, and he hurt Lord Donald sore.
Lord Donald struck the very next blow, and Matty struck no more.

Sucks to be a peasant in a highly stratified agrarian society. Here’s this guy who is seduced into the bed of a noble woman, against his better first judgement, who finds himself slain because of some bad luck and his social position.

And then Lord Donald he took his wife and he sat her on his knee,
Saying, “Who do you like the best of us, Matty Groves or me?”

And then up spoke his own dear wife, never heard to speak so free.
“I’d rather a kiss from dead Matty’s lips than you and your finery.”

Herein lie the clues to Lord Donald’s age and brutality, I think. Of course, we have the prima facie evidence of his brutality in the Lord having just slain his wife’s lover before her eyes. But is this really any more than could be expected from the age and society? I don’t think so. But one thing is utterly clear: she doesn’t want him anymore. Surely she has to know what she has coming when she speaks in such an impudent manner. “Never heard to speak so free”: Remember, she’s nameless. Nameless people don’t speak freely in the presence of nobility. Lord Donald appears to be giving her an out, which is actually quite remarkable. I don’t think that this would necessarily be expected in this society. She could easily have blamed the whole affair on (the now dead) Matty Groves. But, instead, she chose to take a principled stand and, oh, does it cost her.

Lord Donald he jumped up and loudly he did bawl,
He struck his wife right through the heart and pinned her against the wall.

This is pretty horrible. But the question remains: what were his options? This was a violent society — as all pre-modern societies (and most modern ones) are. Lord Donald’s social standing was greatly jeopardized by this incident. It’s unclear to me how it could have ended otherwise given his wife’s newfound freedom. Men’s control of women’s sexuality is a major theme in hierarchical societies — a theme that could fill several quarters worth of classes and would occupy a central place in my proposed class.

“A grave, a grave!” Lord Donald cried, “to put these lovers in.
But bury my lady at the top for she was of noble kin.”

Just in case you had forgotten for a second that this was an intensely stratified society. Even in the context of a double homicide, we need to maintain appearances…

I find all three main characters in this narrative sympathetic to some degree or another. All of them are victims of their social position. Of course, there are better and worse forms of victimhood. Most obviously, Lord Donald lives. He led the most privileged life but he was not immune from intense and potentially overwhelming social expectations. Lord Donald’s wife found herself trapped in a loveless marriage (what is love? what is it for? how universal is it?) to a man to whom she is not attracted with no possibility (because of her social position) for even same-sex friendship for lack of peers. And poor Matty. He is the most hapless really; a total victim of his circumstances.

So this is the general idea for my future IHUM class: An analysis of Human Nature through folk songs. There is lots of potential for higher-order analysis here too. Things having to do with the nature of cultural transmission and how ideas are transformed across time and space. This class would be a blast, particularly if we could have a performance aspect to it.